A week or so ago, I decided I had enough of Ubuntu and the changes for Unity and switched back to Debian. I figured this would be a safe change since I always keep my home partition on a separate drive, so I won't lose anything.

Apparently, I was wrong.

My home partition was on the main drive with a link to the old and separated partition. So, when I formatted my main partition, I accidentally blew away about three years worth of data.

Oops.

The surprising thing is that I don't miss most of it. The stuff that is really critical to me (my stories and game projects) are in source control. For those, I need a catastrophic failure of at least four machines to lose them. Plus, I have hard copies of the one novel I've obsessed about for years (Flight).

Most of the files on the lost drive were... Stuff with a capital "S". Like my DVD collection and books, they pretty much are just space that requires maintenance. I have trouble not buy DVD's and books, just like I have trouble not starring articles in RSS that I never seem to get to, bookmarking things that I might need in the future, and saving "cool things" I might never use. Fluffy gave me a hard time just last weekend becaue I wanted to keep my Make magazines in the hopes that EDM might do a project in them.

So, I haven't been devastated by losing three years of files. But, it also reminds me that I need to be a *lot* more careful in the future.